IT support for the fun, the young and the growing business in and around the Birmingham UK.

Dec 23, 2015

Are you putting your clients cash at risk with an unsecured email system?

In recent months, a new type of email fraud has been hitting the headlines. The scheme sees cybercriminals hijack the email system of legal firms, before sending apparently genuine messages to clients, instructing them to transfer large amounts of money to a dummy bank account (control by the cybercriminal) to complete their property purchase.

Even if hackers only successfully dupe one client, they can still walk away with hundreds of thousands of pounds and destroy your business’ reputation and your clients savings.

The rise of this type fraud seems to have caught everyone by surprise. Here at Kimbley IT our biggest surprise has been how lax legal firms seem to be with making sure their email systems are secure. After all, solicitors deal with some of the most sensitive data imaginable, so their security systems must be excellent right?

Outdated email systems will kill your business

Without an email system a business today cannot exist. Your business will already have an email service, maybe managed by a third party, and everything appears to be working smoothly. But when it comes to email-related cybercrime, you wouldn’t know anything was wrong until it is too late.

While legal firms stand still, technology and cybercrime continues to evolve. If your business has been using the same underlying email system for the last five years and you are unaware of any changes to how it works, stop reading this article and go check with your email provider — if they confirm no changes have been made in the last 5 years, your email server is ripe for an attack.

Using the cloud to keep your email secure

Here at Kimbley IT, all of our clients use Gmail for Work. This email service is provided and run by Google while Kimbley IT handles the support and management of the service.

Gmail provides your business with all the tools you need to send and receive emails with ease on any device, it requires no additional costly hardware and has a much lower total cost of ownership than local server based or hosted email services. More importantly still, you are protected by Google’s enterprise-grade security, keeping hackers at bay, and dramatically reducing the chances of your business falling prey to email fraud. By making the switch to Gmail, your firm gains a massive advantage over competitors who stick with older technology that leaves them (and their clients) at risk of attack.

And by choosing Birmingham’s only Google Apps Certified Deployment Specialist, Kimbley IT, you gain yet another layer of security.

Email with more than just security

The traditional onsite email server is also a point of potential failure for all your communications — if the server goes down, your employees lose access to all of their historical messages, as well as being unable to send and receive new ones. Your business simply grinds to a halt.

By moving to Google Apps, you dramatically reduce downtime, keeping your communications moving. Even if your offices burn down, all of your communications are stored safely and securely in Google’s Cloud, so your team can pick them up from anywhere they have an internet connection.

Google Apps — a smart move for solicitors. And everyone else.

By providing the ability to improve security, protect client confidentiality, reduce cybercrime, increase availability, cut costs and help your firm gains a competitive advantage, Gmail beats your onsite email on every level. And those same benefits are available to any business — not just solicitors.